I have introduced some link shorteners and simplifiers before. They allow you to shorten long URLs and make web pages easier to read. Citebite, the web app I’m going to introduce, works in a similar way but produce different results. Instead of an easy to remember URL, it generates a new URL with a (seemingly) random string of characters. It probably does not make URLs easier to remember or enter, but it helps you to quote a specific part of a web page for sharing and sending to friends. It is very useful when you want to share a web site to others but want to highlight only a specific part of it.

Citebite: Link Directly to Specific Quotes in Web Pages

Citebite is very easy to use. Just copy the URL of the site and the text you want to highlight, paste into Citebite, it will generate an URL for sharing. I used a blog post in this blog as an example.

If your friends follow this link, they will see the web site with the specific part highlighted. I found this very useful for sharing long web pages.

By default, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg icons are provided for fast sharing to these sites. You can also manually copy the link and attach to email, tweets and updates in Google+ and Facebook.

Citebite has a Firefox extension (sorry, not for Chrome). Users of other web browsers could use a bookmarklet instead. Both of them are provided on the official site.